Conversations in Ebury Street, Chapter 12

London: William Heineman, 1 January 1924, pages 155-166, 3,701 words

Conversations in Ebury Street is a nonlinear volume of nineteen chapters. Chapters 7-11 are essays in art criticism; chapter 19 is worldbuilding; the rest are essays in literary criticism. The chapters appear separately in the Aesthetics and Worlds pillars of George Moore Interactive. All are included in the ebook of Conversations in Ebury Street in the GMi Shop.

XII

The saints of the Middle Ages speak of their sufferings when Jesus withdrew himself from them, and when we follow art too closely, too greedily, forgetting all things for art's sake, Apollo in his wisdom deserts us. It was so in the hot month of August last year. Theocritus and Landor were laid aside, and I said: It would seem that we must not seek relief in our own art but in a sister art; and I fell to thinking how, to escape from myself, I had left my house a quarter of a century ago to attend a perform­ance of Lohengrin, which despite its mediocrity sent me home exultant all the way from the Shaftesbury Theatre through the Park to Victoria Street. And Apollo having again withdrawn himself during my exile in Dublin, I said: Why sit staring at the lamp till midnight? Some amateurs are performing The Doll’s House. Why not go to see the mess they’ll make of it? And faults there were to find, no doubt, but I keep no memory of them, only of the exultant happiness in which I returned home, walking as if on air past Merrion Square to Ely Place. If I were a king I would keep a company of singers and players rehearsed sufficiently to go on at a moment's notice; but I am a poor composer in Ebury Street, with no refuge but sleep from those terrible moments when the God withdraws himself. And on the hot Sunday I am telling, an August afternoon last year, I laid myself out in my armchair and slept fitfully, roused towards six o'clock by the clock striking or by some half-dream, half­ thought, I know not which. In an hour, I said, Clara will come to lay the cloth. Mabel has gone for her holidays…. And whilst waiting for the clock to strike the half-hour, I fell asleep again, and from this second sleep I was awakened by the clinking of spoons and forks in the passage. Clara asked me if I were not feeling well. I answered: Although in good health and strength, I am conscious that life is ebbing from me. Clara made no answer, and to break the silence that fell, I asked what dinner she had devised. Some fried cod, sir. Clara, I could not eat cod this evening. Boiled — she began. Speak not of it, Clara; and what comes after the…? Cutlets, sir. Clara, I have been feeling tired all the afternoon, and would like to dine at a restaurant. Well, sir, the cutlets wilI keep till to-morrow. To-morrow must look after itself, I said, and now if I could find my hat. With Clara's assistance the hat was found, and I walked rapidly to Sloane Square, thinking that perhaps in the Queen's Restaurant I might meet the familiar mummers from the theatre; but none was at the reserved table, and whilst regretting their absence I allowed myself to be enticed by the bill of fare. Mulligatawny was chosen, for I needed something tasty, and it was barely eaten when a picturesque figure, a cross between a Scottish laird and a Spanish hidalgo, in fine, a shadow of Don Quixote thrown across the screen of this modern world, entered.

Cunninghame Graham! I said, and was about to ask him to sit at my table when he proposed to do so, which was better than if he had acceded to my request; for his wish to sit with me relieved me of my doubts lest I should prove a wearisome companion, a vain fear, for no one wearies in his company. He ordered soup, but which? Croûte au pot! it was certainly croûte au pot; but I do not recall the fish he ate, remembering, however, and distinctly, that I asked him if the lamb was worth eating. Barely, he answered, and taking the hint I did not follow him into lamb, but ordered a grilled sole and une omelette Lyonnaise, after which I had some strawberries, and these I did not dilute with cream, according to the English custom, but poured a little claret upon. Un souvenir de Montmartre, he said. And as we approached the coffee a plan began to mature in my mind: I would invite him to 121, Ebury Street, and enjoy for an hour the soul of a hidalgo. He consented; and so sensible was I of conversing with old Spain that it vexed me to remember on our way to Ebury Street that I had only cigars to offer a man who, as all the world knows, speaks Spanish like Don Quixote and has lived most of his life amid tribes, retaining, in spite of many various idioms and languages, a firm hold of the English language. A real Scottish grip he has of it, as anybody can see for himself who — but more of that anon.

Cunninghame Graham has lived with the gauchos, and to see him was enough to stress in imagination the cows, steers, bulls, even the fleet llamas, brought to earth with the whirling bolus or the encircling lasso; and the surety with which he speaks of these facts leaves no doubt in our minds that they were performed by him and will be performed again when the occasion calls for them. And from Sloane Square to Ebury Street, he continued to sit in my imagination with one leg round the pommel, half asleep — that is how the gauchos always sleep, themselves and their nags. And it was, I swear it, with no other purpose but to encourage him to tell me stories that would make a boy of me again, that I related my poor little experience of Arab horses that cannot trot, and the consequent fatigue of the journey from Jerusalem, and how, after a long search for a suitable monastery, we encamped in the arid desert which lies along the eastern coast of the Dead Sea. You know, Cunninghame Graham, what it is to awaken out of the shallow sleep of the bivouac and to ask whence you have come and whither you are going, or if it be your destiny to die among the sand-hills that the wind created yesterday and will un­create to-morrow. You know the feeling? Do I know the feeling! he answered, and he spoke instantly of sitting round a blaze of dry bushes gathered by gauchos, of the bird-like forms of grey llamas browsing in the moonlight, of rifles, pistols, and the whirling of boluses at a hand gallop, and that himself would match himself to bring down a cow at sixty yards with a bolus, or to lasso a wild horse at — the exact distance at which he could lasso a wild horse I did not learn that evening, for my guest relinquished his tale of wild horses for an amusing story of a man in Hyde Park, who, after seeing Cunninghame Graham catch a horse with a lasso, said: I defy you to catch me by the feet. My guest begged the man to believe that if he lassoed him he would get a heavy fall, but the man persisted, saying he could escape the noose. The lasso was thrown, and the man turned a summersault and looked round dazed, like a man who receives an upper-cut in a prize fight.

But even such stories come to an end, and our thoughts turned to the weather, and from it sprang the mental suffering that hot days bring to the civilised man who dozes in his armchair with a chapter of a book in his mind that he cannot compose. Alas, I was back at the source of my torment; and, too feeble of mind to return to the size of the three balls, I told him I was writing a book to replace Impressions and Opinions. Would you mind being made use of? I said. I have to write to-morrow, and to tell you how I propose to treat the subject will be a great help. You won't object, he answered, to my breaking in occasionally to add something if something should occur to me? On the contrary, I said; and you can count upon my gratitude for anything you may be able to say about Verlaine and Rimbaud; any impression you have gotten from their poetry I shall be able to develop. All I want is a hint, something from the outside; within I am wasted and weary of their names. I shall run the hint that you let drop like a hound a scent, but I really cannot bring myself to write again that Verlaine's verses flow like a wistful brook, and that Rimbaud's sound like a clarion heard in the aspiring woods of Ville D'Avray, The suppressed book is full of that kind of thing. In these circumstances, said Cunninghame Graham, you cannot do better than omit the articles. I cannot omit the articles, for it was I who introduced these poets to England and very nearly to France. If I do not get a hint from the outside I shall produce another article that might be published in a review, and for title: Certain Aspects of the Genius of Verlaine and Rimbaud will do. So many aspects of Henry James's genius have been published that the Editor will welcome the title again, and the rather if I say nothing in twelve pages. It is astonishing how many young men there are of this generation all wanting to write about the arts, and who go on writing about them without finding out that they have nothing to say. More extraordinary still, said Cunninghame Graham, are the men who produce a masterpiece between twenty and thirty and live for half a century in the fading glories of it. Rimbaud was just such a one, I answered. He produced a masterpiece at eighteen, and then retired to Abyssinia to drive camels. Books are read in modem times not for what is in them but for the sake of the author's sexual eccentricities, said the subtle hidalgo, and after listening to me for some time he asked me how I connected Rimbaud’s literary sterility with Verlaine, who continued to write beautiful poems to the end of his life. I answered that Verlaine's and Rimbaud's names are linked together by their attachment for each other, physically and intellectually; and we spoke of the shooting affray in Brussels, and Verlaine's imprisonment for attempted murder. And then we talked at random till Cunninghame Graham remembered Rimbaud's enlistment under the banner of Don Carlos, and his immediate desertion with the money he had received; but he could not recall the circumstance in which he had enlisted under the Dutch flag for service in Java, merely the fact that no sooner had the ship touched port than he deserted again. We were agreed that he had worked his passage to England as an interpreter; we lost and we picked up the scent again when he sailed for Alexandria; and seeing him in our imagination in Egypt on a camel on his way to Abyssinia, Cunninghame Graham said: If you had chosen to write a novel about Rimbaud you would have had to travel in Abyssinia in search of local colour. It seems to me, my dear Cunninghame Graham, that if I were to follow Rimbaud into Abyssinia I should be going over old ground instead of breaking new. Rimbaud did not write any account of his travels, Cunninghame Graham answered, and if you are not going to discuss Verlaine's poetry, nor his relations with Rimbaud and with Lucien Létinois, your narrative will perforce be restricted to an account of Verlaine's religious emotions and experiences. You will attribute his conversion and Sagesse to his imprisonment in Mons, but will this be the truth? I doubt if Verlaine was ever converted, certainly not to theology. You feel, Cunninghame Graham, that there was nothing Scotch in Verlaine, and though he would have liked your grey skies and rainy days, he would have wilted in argument whether the Ghost proceeded from the Father and the Son or from the Father alone. His attachment, said Cunninghame Graham, to religion was stinted to stained-glass windows and the Pope's Indulgences, and these, strangely enough, did not prevent his robbing his mother of money to give to Lucien Létinois — rushing at her, knife in hand. To my mind, Verlaine's claim to distinction among immoralists is neither Arthur nor Lucien but his remarkable exemption from any moral instincts whatsoever.

You forget, Cunningbame Graham, that there are as many moralities as there are creeds. I beg your pardon, answered my hidalgo: moral instincts. Forgetting, I answered, that beauty is a morality, and that Verlaine never deviated from the only morality he was aware of. Of how many poets can you say as much? And is it certain that poems as beautiful as Verlaine's are a less potent influence for good than sleepy sermons and the administration of the common law? His vices were his own and died with him. You asked me, said Cunninghame Graham, to raise objections and I have raised one, which you have answered. I am glad you think I have. I will raise another, for you have encouraged me. If Verlaine's sense of beauty could not save him from vice I fail to see why it should save others. Because beauty is in the end a more powerful influence than evil. The theologian hidden in every Scotsman begins to appear, I answered, but I think I can give a better reason, Few men are divided into halves. Verlaine is an exception, one that you will find hard to match; and I think you will agree with me that if Verlaine be judged by his mind only, the judgment will be nearer the truth than if he were judged by his acts. My dear Moore, do you think you can show Verlaine's daily life to be wholly absent from his poems? Verlaine, I replied, did not deviate from his morality; no matter the theme, the morality is the same always:

Âme, te souvient-il, au fond du paradis,

De la gare d'Auteuil et des trains de jadis

T'amenant chaque jour, venus de La Chapelle,

and ending with the strange enchantment of the line:

Mon pauvre enfant, ta voix dans le Bois de Boulogne!

And there is the sonnet to Parsifal, written when he was lying ill in the Cour Saint-François, 6 Hôtel du Midi, rue Moreau, whither I went with Dujardin, who was then editing the Revue Wagnérienne; and had I not gone I should have missed the hint that inspired this paper — a paper not one word of which is written, and which may never be written. I am not certain that what I have in mind is realisable. Do you never, Cunninghame Graham, find yourself in the end deluded?

Gods and men, we are all deluded thus.

We pursue a maiden, and clasp a reed.

How does it go on? But cease to trouble your memory. I shall never be able to put this double life upon paper. I would tell how the discrepancies came together, to live and to die together, inseparable and yet for ever divided. Will you have a cigar, Cunninghame Graham? No, thank you; I never smoke cigars. Ah! I had forgotten. Of course, a Spaniard never did, never will, never could. What were we talking about? You were telling me about going forth with a man called Dujardin to seek Verlaine, who was lying ill. Ah, yes, in search of the sonnet to Parsifal which Verlaine had promised Dujardin, and which appeared in the Revue Wagnérienne, of that I am sure. So it must have been in the early 'eighties, 'eighty-four or 'eighty-five, that Dujardin said to me: The sonnet has not arrived, and we are going to Press the day after to-morrow. But stay, Dujardin; you have told me that he lives in the Quartier du Temple, and I don't think I care — You will rue your scruples when he is dead, Dujardin interrupted, and believing this to be true I followed him into an omnibus, and when we came to the terminus into a tram; a little later we changed trams, and the second took us past factories and canals. Are we going to take the boat? I asked; my friend laughed, and stopped to ask the bargeman if they knew the rue Moreau. The answers they gave did not help us, and for a Iong time we were lost in a tangle of noisy streets, in musty and clamorous courtyards, asking every passer-by to direct us to the Hôtel du Midi, which, when found, did not avail us much, for number six was as hard to discover as the hotel itself. We mounted many staircases, knocked at different doors, received new instructions; and so wearied were we with climbing that we could hardly believe our eyes when number six confronted us.

A boy with a face so rosy that he reminded me of a butcher-boy, opened to us, and among some dirty bed­ clothes we came upon Verlaine. His sinister eyes seemed to reflect the stony silence of the prison cell and yard, and his bald, prominent forehead, his shaggy eyebrows, frightened me; and Dujardin, too, was frightened when Verlaine offered to show us his leg, which he said was better but still gave him so much pain that he might have to return to the hospital. And he would have shown us his leg if he had not remembered as he was about to lift the bedclothes that his duty as a host was to offer us some wine. The butcher-boy went for a litre, and whilst we drank wine at sixteen sous the litre Verlalne watched us, amused by his joke, thinking it a better one on the whole than the first that had occurred to him — the turning of our stomachs by the exhibition of his leg. We were young and enthusiastic and hoped, luck having favoured us so far, that by drinking the wine we should persuade him to recite his sonnet to us. But the cat is not to be caught by mice, and Verlaine played with us, telling us that he would not deprive us of the pleasure of reading the sonnet by reciting it to us. We were glad to hear him say this, for the Revue needed something that all its readers would enjoy and approve. He spoke of a certain hiatus which appealed to his ear and a certain music outside the ordinary rhythm that our ears were doubtless weary of. We answered that his ear would allow no jarring note; we were sure of that and refrained from expressing our doubts regarding the subject of the sonnet, for when he began to tell the subject he turned to the butcher-boy and described women as trash. And then he spoke of his son, whom he had not brought up as a garçon de café, though what trade, avouched Verlaine, was more advantage to a young man than that of a garçon de café? Truly, no trade could have reduced a human being lower than Verlaine seemed to us at that moment, and unable to bear his society and that of the butcher-boy any longer, we departed, saying to ourselves: We shall not be able to publish the sonnet.

Here it is, said Dujardin to me the next day; here is the sonnet which you have heard Verlaine speak of as autobiographical. You cannot publish it! I cried. Listen, said Dujardin, and now to you, Cunninghame Graham, I say the same: Listen:

Parsifal a vaincu les Filles, leur gentil

Babil et la luxure amusante — et sa pente

Vers la chair de garçon vierge que cela tente

D'aimer les seins légers et ce gentil babil.

Il a vaincu la Femme belle, au coeur subtil,

Étalant ses bras frais et sa gorge excitante;

Il a vaincu l'Enfer et rentre sous la tente

Avec un lourd trophée à son bras puéril.

Avec la lance qui perça le Flanc suprême!

Il a guéri le roi, le voici roi lui-même

Et prêtre du très saint Trésor essentiel.

En robe d'or il adore, gloire et symbole,

Le vase pur où resplendit le sang réel.

— Et, ô ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole!

The music of this poem lay dormant for centuries in the French language, so long that it seems archaic in modern speech. Did you never see Verlaine again? Cunninghame Graham asked. Yes; in Memoirs of My Dead Life l tell another meeting, and there was a third. My book, Confessions of a Young Man, was published in the Revue Indépendante, and Dujardin gave a luncheon. My old friend Mallarmé was present, and Verlaine, too, was there. Huysmans I do not remember, yet Dujardin could hardly have left him out. No one is a better host than Dujardin, he provides for everybody. Mary Laurent, of whom I speak in Memoirs of My Dead Life as toule la lyre, was present, and from the other end of the table she sent me messages with her eyes that the intrigue that had ravelled years ago in Manet's studio was not forgotten and might be smoothed out and tied into a pretty bow at last; and nothing loth for her to tie it, I encouraged her with glances when I was not listening to Verlaine, in whose humble voice I could discover no trace of personal pride, yet he must have known even then that he was a great poet. In his conversation, as in his books, he was like the old woman in Villon's ballade, a poor Christian devoid of riches and all distinction, who believes and hopes to find grace hereafter with her Sovereign Lord and Master. Verlaine's name will always be linked with Villon's, and were Villon unknown to us who is there that would not swear that the refrain of the ballade:

Dans cette foie je veux vivre et mourir,

was a line of Verlaine's and to be found in Sagesse?